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From Dead to Alive

Is it your experience that you can play the Tai Chi form in a beautiful flowing manner but cannot use the techniques in push hands?

Or perhaps you can but only if your training partner is not resisting and the moment he tries to resist the techniques fly out the window and you revert to doing boxing-like techniques.

To learn how a technique works particularly the principles involved that bring it alive we break down the learning into a few parts. What is important to us is not looking nice and fluffy. Instead, we value precision in moving to fulfill various principles, objectives and strategies.

Apparent Close-Up is a technique that follows Deflect, Parry & Punch in our Yang 108 form. It is typically used as a counter to prevent our punching arm from being controlled. It is a fairly easy technique to understand but ask your training partner to block your punching arm and follow up with using strength to control your punching arm. See if you can get out of it. You will be surprised how easily your use of Apparent Close-Up falls apart when the resistance is stronger.

After jamming the opponent’s attempt to control our punching arm and recovering our position we next follow up with a controlling cum attacking technique. The way we do this is different from that typically seen in other Yang styles.

My student was just asking me about it last night. I said that we could do it the way we normally see other Yang stylists do it. However, our way is actually easier to use the technique.

This is not because our way is better but the physics and exploitation of the natural weakness of the human anatomy make our method easier to apply. This is immediately obvious to anyone who tries to apply the double palms pushing attack at the end of Apparent Close-Up against a resisting opponent. Just do the research and the whys will be explained.

Do you understand why you are doing what you are doing? Does it work against a resisting training partner? If you are keen to discover the answers click here.